This paper extends and enriches the current research on CSR, CEO compensation contracts and characteristics of the board of directors by examining an underexplored question related to the potential impact of independent board members on the share of CSR criteria in executive compensation. It also considers a potential moderating effect of gender diversity in this relationship. Empirical analyses of a sample French firms listed on the SBF120 index between 2014 and 2021 show that independent directors have no impact on the (...) inclusion of CSR criteria in the annual bonus of senior executives. They also reveal that gender diversity can strengthen the role of independent directors in indexing executive compensation to CSR criteria. The findings can be useful for corporate boards and policymakers seeking to boost the adoption of CSR criteria in executive compensation contracts. They provide empirical support for the Zimmermann law (2011) and urge the policymakers to boost the appointment of female directors on boards. (shrink)

Although a tainted outside director’s social status may serve as a buffer against devaluation owing to an affiliate firm’s corporate financial misconduct, the extent of this buffer effect is unclear. We propose a threshold approach by introducing the expectancy violation perspective, which generates a theoretical tension from the network-embeddedness perspective, to clarify the following question: From which perspective does the buffer effect of social status become more salient? Specifically, we propose an inverted U–shaped relationship between the directors’ social (...) status and the departure of tainted outside directors from host firms. We theorize that when directors’ social status exceeds a certain threshold, the network-embeddedness perspective is more dominant than the expectancy violation perspective. Moreover, a host firm’s external stakeholder attention and board social status moderate the inverted-U effect such that its turning point shifts to the right because such contingencies increase the threshold for the buffer. Using a sample of tainted outside directors penalized for associated firms’ financial misconduct, we find evidence that supports our predictions. Our study helps clarify the boundary between the competing theoretical perspectives of expectancy violation and network embeddedness to explain the phenomenon of tainted director departure. (shrink)

Most of the debate for and against aesthetic formalism in the twentieth century has been little more than a sequence of assertions, on both sides. But there is one discussion that stands out for its argumentative subtlety and depth, and that is Kendall Walton’s paper ‘Categories of Art’.1 In what follows I shall defend a certain version of formalism against the antiformalist arguments which Walton deploys. I want to show that while Walton’s arguments do indeed create insurmountable difficulties for (...) an extreme version of formalism, he has not shown that a moderate version is problematic or inadequate. (I have no space to address anti-formalist arguments other than Walton’s.2) I shall defend moderate formalism rather than put forward positive considerations in its favour, although some of its attractions will become apparent as a side-effect. I pursue the positive case for moderate formalism elsewhere.3 I. FORMAL PROPERTIES AND FORMALISMS I.1. Walton begins his paper by raising an issue about whether those who make aesthetic judgements should only be concerned with what can be directly perceived in works of art. The issue of formalism has often been described in these terms. But Walton rightly distances himself from setting up a debate in that way. He moves on to take as his target the view that ‘Circumstances connected with a work’s origin ... have no essential bearing on an assessment of its aesthetic nature’ (p. 334). (shrink)

This study focuses on CEO hubris and its detrimental effect on corporate financial performance along with an examination of critical corporate governance contingencies that may moderate the negative effect. From 654 observations of 164 Korean firms over the years 2001–2008, we found that CEO power exacerbated the negative effect of CEO hubris on corporate financial performance, whereas board vigilance mitigated it. This study provides empirical evidence that entrenchment problems arising from CEO hubris would be exacerbated as CEOs become more (...) powerful, but weakened as board of directors become more vigilant. Theoretical contributions and practical implications will be discussed. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

Abstract:In Scotland, policies supporting the development of wind farms frequently come into conflict with those designed to protect wild land. The siting of turbines is, amongst other things, administered by wild land areas, whilst wild land areas are, in part, characterized by the absence of turbines. In this article, I focus on how the classification of wild land has been constructed in official narratives and I describe the substantial scale of collaborative human labor implicated in this process. I draw on (...) the story of a public local inquiry into a wind farm proposal to make visible some of the contradictions implicit in the term's use and to argue that wildness, as conceived by Scottish Government, is primarily an aesthetic category which relies on absences. I argue that employing wild land as an administrative technology conceals the various kinds of labor that are intrinsic to creating wild land. The work of extending and reinforcing the technologies which govern land use is hidden behind the notion of wild land as a place from which human exertions and technologies are absent. (shrink)

Philosophers have become newly interested in the ethics of sex. One promising feature of this new discussion is that it has been broadening our moral lens to include individuals whose sexual interests have historically been denied or ignored. One such group is the elderly. Contrary to popular belief, many elderly people want to have sex and see it as a regular part of their lives. If society harbors ignorance about or prejudice against elderly sexuality, it harbors stronger views against (...) the sexual expression of elderly people with dementia. People with dementia are often prohibited by nursing‐home staff, sometimes in extreme ways, from having sex with their partners. This prohibition is at least partly motivated by the goal of protecting the vulnerable. However, cutting people with dementia off from sex has negative health effects and is a needless restriction of their autonomy. In this article, I argue that the expanding moral lens in sexual ethics should include the sexual expression of elderly individuals with dementia and that their sexual expression should be respected. Specifically, I argue that many people with dementia are competent to consent to sexual activity with their long‐term partners. (shrink)

I have become more convinced, over the years, by the truth of Wittgenstein’s characterisation of philosophy as arising through misconceptions of grammar. Such a misconception of grammar characterises a very popular approach to indexicality which has been current since the 1970s, stemming from the work of Casteñeda, and Kaplan. Gareth Evans was inclined to allow, for instance, that one could say ‘“To the left (I am hot)” is true, as uttered by x at t iff there is someone moderately (...) near to the left of x such that, if he were to utter the sentence “I am hot” at t, what he would thereby say is true’ (Evans 1985: 358). But not only does this disturb the proper relation between direct and indirect speech, it continues a Fregean tradition which these very cases show to be quite mistaken about the logic of intensions. In this paper, however, I want primarily to point out how this misconception of grammar has distorted our view of people. For some of the above thinkers have tried to make out that human motivation is related to the possession of a certain category of indexical belief, by Lewis called ‘de se beliefs’. I shall look here at how the matter arises in Hugh Mellor’s work on Time. In connection with Time, indexicality arises in McTaggart’s ‘A-series’, and Mellor treats this indexicality in parallel with Evans’ language. First, therefore, I aim to show how Mellor’s discussion of Time grammatically misconceives the situation, and leads to a misrepresentation of the motivation of human action. But a larger conclusion about Fregean intensions is also then immediately available. (shrink)

Peter Singer famously argues that speciesism, like racism and sexism, is based on a preju-dice. As Singer argues, since we reject racism and sexism, we must also reject speciesism. Since Singer articulated this line of reasoning, it has become a widespread argument against speciesism. Shelly Kagan has recently critiqued this argument, claiming that one can endorse speciesism with-out doing so on the basis of a prejudice. In this paper, I defend Kagan’s conclusion (that one can endorse speciesism without being (...) prejudiced). However, many philosophers have found Kagan’s argument deeply unsatisfactory; so, I advance an alternative argument, different from Kagan’s, in support of his conclusion. My argument runs as follows: I argue that, if there is epistemic peer dis-agreement about a view, then the parties to this disagreement cannot reasonably label each other as prejudiced in their beliefs about this view. Then, I argue that there is epistemic peer disagreement about the truth of speciesism, from which it follows that the parties to this disagreement cannot rea-sonably label each other as prejudiced. Thus, one can affirm speciesism without being prejudiced. If I am correct that one can affirm speciesism without being prejudiced, then Singer’s argument (that if one rejects racism, one must reject speciesism) is unsound. (shrink)

As it has become more and more urgent to solve the problems of environmental protection, we consider it necessary to conduct multilevel studies to examine the impact of business strategy on both employees’ and firms’ performances in environmental protection. Synthesizing the perspectives of strategic orientation, corporate strategy, and firm performance, we propose a comprehensive theoretical model linking market orientation and environmental performance. Based on a survey of 134 matched chief executive officers, senior marketing managers and frontline workers from (...) Chinese firms, we found that market orientation positively affects environmental strategy which, in turn, influences both environmental product quality and employees’ environmental involvement. These latter two variables consequently have a positive influence on environmental performance. At the same time, environmental commitment moderates the link between market orientation and environmental strategy. (shrink)

IN THIS ESSAY I CONSIDER WHETHER POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT MAKES good persons. I first examine how the self is formed as a moral agent in and through the exercise of moral agency in political life, which I call "political agency." Politics is a morally ambiguous context of formation. On the one hand, political engagement trains the skills and virtues conducive to good citizenship in particular and the good life in general. But it also entails the instrumental and even coercive uses of (...) power to countervail the interests of others. This often leaves the self disintegrated. Drawing on John Calvin's moral theology, I argue that God transfigures this fractured, political self in the cruciform shape that lives dedicated to politics take. The political self becomes a site of God's redeeming work in the world. (shrink)

This paper responds to Are the Semi-Living semi-good or semi-evil? (Technoetic Arts, 2003) in which artists/authors Zurr and Catts state that there is not, as yet, an existing discourse that deals with the Semi-Living a new life form created for the purpose of artistic engagement using the tools of tissue engineering and stem cell technology. As a means to reflect on what a discourse on the Semi-Living might include and exclude and to create the potential to say something different beyond (...) the artists own discourse, this paper initiates two approaches. First, it considers that which the Semi-Living defers by working from Zurr and Catts contribution, which I argue evokes a both/and logic that echoes the Derridean deconstructive event. Secondly, it proposes a genealogy of the Semi-Living using a figure of Roman archaic law, homo sacer (sacred man) who shares with the Semi-Living a life exposed to death (Agamben 1998). The symbiosis of these two approaches identifies, problematises and contaminates the limits of acceptable discourse concerning the Semi-Living, concluding with the proposal of a semi-discourse. As the transdisciplinarity of bioart increasingly becomes the focus of academic and artistic inquiry, this paper signals towards the importance of critically acknowledging a community of artists writing and working within the academy, stipulating the acceptable discourses of their practice. (shrink)

Through an original and extraordinarily fruitful reading of the Hegelian conception of negativity, Catherine Malabou developed the concept of plasticity which she keeps working on as one of her cardinal concepts even to this day. Engaging in the problematic of unity in Hegel, the paper takes on the task of trying to answer the question whether plasticity is one or are there several plasticities. The author argues that one must be careful not to reduce the inherent multiple of plasticity to (...) a single plasticity which becomes plasticity par excellence: the plasticity of plastic explosion, of an abrupt and absolute break, to be distinguished from a creative or productive plasticity of habit. Malabou claimed that Hegel was - contrary to what Deleuz read in him - a philosopher of conceptual multitude as a multitude which cannot be reduced to only one image, the image of unity. If this is true, then the concept of plasticity itself with which she grasped the essence of Hegel?s dialectics, should be understood at least as a?unity in conflict?, if not as an inorganic, inhomogeneous, composed unity - and perhaps even as a unity of the pack. nema. (shrink)

The natural instinct for members of the Committee on Publication Ethics, which now number almost 12,200, as well as academia, is to assume that this organization works under strict and clearly defined ethical parameters, with a solid vision, and an independent mandate that is not influenced by power, think tanks, or partisan interests. Naturally, whistle-blowing and science shaming are not practices that one would usually associate with an ethics organization like COPE, because they involve ethically and morally questionable practices. Despite (...) this, ethical borders have become blurred between the objectives of Retraction Watch and PubPeer, two self-moderated science watchdogs that rely heavily on these questionable practices, in their efforts to grow and survive, and the values espoused by COPE. A Retraction Watch post, in which the former COPE Chair, Virginia Barbour, made a claim of apparent harassment, is the most striking example of the dangers when collaboration may take place between science-shaming websites, and an ethics organization, COPE. These bonds appear to have been in development for a number of years already, with the inclusion of Elizabeth Wager, the former COPE Chair, as a director of The Center for Science Integrity Inc., Retraction Watch’s parent organization. Retraction Watch was financed by, among other groups, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, whose leader, John Arnold, an ex-Enron trader, declared a “war on bad science”, which may naturally include the destruction of aspects of science as well. Retraction Watch embraces several infamous pseudonymous personas under the broad umbrella of freedom of speech, liaising thereby with PubPeer. There is no doubt that errors in the literature need correcting, but this apparent connection with COPE raises questions about the basic ethical foundation of this relationship. Are scientists to embrace this bond between COPE and science watchdogs and pseudonymous whistle-blowers as the new normal in the correction of the scientific literature? This opinion piece puts forward arguments why the author believes that the ethical compass of COPE has become skewed. (shrink)

By working with underserved communities, anthropologists may play a larger role in democratizing society. The growth of disparities challenges anthropology to be used for social justice. This engaged stance moves the application of anthropological theory, methods, and practice toward action and activism. However, this engagement also moves anthropologists away from traditional roles of observation toward participatory roles that become increasingly involved with those communities or social groupings being studied. The chapters in this book suggest the roles anthropologists are able (...) to play to bring us closer to a public anthropology characterized as engagement. Sam Beck is Senior Lecturer in the College of Human Ecology and Director of the Urban Semester Program of Cornell University. His publications include Ethnicity and Nationalism in Southeastern Europe (1981, ed with John W. Cole) and Manny Almeida's Ringside Lounge: The Cape Verdean Struggle for their Neighborhood (1992). Carl A. Maida is Professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. His publications include Sustainability and Communities of Place (2007), Pathways through Crisis: Urban Risk and Public Culture (2008), Children and Disasters (1999), and The Crisis of Competence: Transitional Stress and the Displaced Worker (1990). (shrink)

Since the 1990s we witness a rise in public apologies. Are we living in the `Age of Apology¿? Interesting research questions can be raised about the opportunity, the form, the meaning, the effectiveness and the ethical implications of public apologies. Are they not merely a clever and easy device to escape real and tangible responsibility for mistakes or wrong done? Are they not at risk to become well-rehearsed rituals that claim to express regret but, in fact, avoid doing so? (...) In a joint interdisciplinary effort, the contributors to this book, combining findings from their specific fields of research (legal, religious, political, linguistic, marketing and communication studies), attempt to articulate this tension between ritual and sincere regret, between the discourse and the content of apologies, between excuses that pretend and regret that seeks reconciliation. Daniël Cuypers: Professor of Labour Law and Discrimination Law at the University of Antwerp, Daniel Janssen: Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and international guest Professor at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, Jacques Haers: Academic Director University Centre Saint Ignatius Antwerpen and Professor of Systematic Theology at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, Barbara Segaert: Scientific Coordinator, University Centre Saint Ignatius Antwerpen. (shrink)

This guest column in Common Knowledge is one of three published under the heading “Economy and Humanity.” The authors argue that collaborative research projects carried out by scholars in the arts and humanities in cooperation with commercial enterprises represent an important step forward for both sectors. Such projects further academic research interests, in the process helping scholars to become effective social actors, and they help companies to better navigate commercial risks by advancing their understanding of the cultural conditions in (...) which they operate. This nexus is what the authors call the “Humanities Economy,” and in this piece they propose ways in which it can be advanced and enhanced. (shrink)

ANTI-FORMALISM has become the consensus in aesthetics. But in my view anti-formalism is not true to our aesthetic experience; it gives a revisionary account of the aesthetic properties that we think we find in works of art. The thesis I think we should hold is not extreme formalism—the view that all or almost all aesthetic properties are formal—but the moderate thesis that many are. This view has not been given its due because so many aestheticians have been convinced by (...) anti-formalist arguments. In this short paper, I propose a systematic method for resisting anti-formalist arguments. The method is to apply one of three strategies. These strategies are repeatable archetypes. I shall show these neutralizing strategies at work with seven objections to formalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2008 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesPeter A. HuffThe Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies (SBCS) sponsored two sessions in conjunction with the 2008 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). The first session addressed the topic "Cognitive Science, Religious Practices, and Human Development: Buddhist and Christian Perspectives." The second session focused on the life and legacy of Trappist monk, spiritual writer, and interfaith pioneer Thomas Merton (...) (1915–1968).The first session, moderated by Sandra Costen Kunz (Phillips Theological Seminary), featured five papers probing the relationship between research in the natural and social sciences and lessons from the experience of Buddhist and Christian practice: "The Body and the Mind: Buddhist Bowing and Neuroscience," presented by Paula K. Arai (Louisiana State University) and coauthored with Sascha du Lac (Salk Institute for Biological Sciences); "Who Hears? A Zen Buddhist Perspective" by Robert Aitken Roshi, founder and retired Zen master of the Diamond Sangha in Honolulu (read by Ruben Habito, Southern Methodist University); "'Your Cell Will Teach You Everything': Old Wisdom, Modern Science, and the Art of Attention" by Noreen Herzfeld (St. John's University); "Verbal Imagining: Scientific Reflection on Visual Cognition in Light of Traditional Tibetan and Christian Theologies of the Image" by Thomas Cattoi (Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley); and "Cognitive Error and Contemplative Practices: The Cultivation of Discernment in Mind and Heart" by Wesley J. Wildman (Boston University). Revised versions of three of these papers with an introductory essay by Prof. Costen Kunz are included in this issue of Buddhist-Christian Studies.The theme for the society's second session, chaired by Alice Keefe (University of Wisconsin), was "Thomas Merton Forty Years after His Death: Buddhist and Christian Perspectives." Four presenters examined and evaluated Merton's distinctive contributions to Buddhist-Christian relations, theological reflection, and interreligious dialogue. In her paper "Self-Surrender in Merton's Writings and Contemplative Psychology," Daijaku Judith Kinst (California Institute of Integral Studies) concentrated on the place of subjective transformation in Merton's thought, describing his [End Page 143] "great gift" to the literature on the contemplative life as the "fearless" rejection of self-centeredness in the practice of prayer and spiritual formation. "Thomas Merton Meets Tibetan Buddhism" by Judith Simmer-Brown (Naropa University) shed new light on the impact of the dzogchen ("great completion") tradition on Merton's evolving spirituality, particularly as expressed in the letters, speeches, and private documents included in the posthumously published Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1973). In "Non-Dual Wisdom as Feminine: Sophia and Prajnaparamita in Merton's Poem 'Hagia Sophia,'" Paula Hirschboeck (Edgewood College) explored suggestive parallels between Christian mystical experience and Buddhist madhyamika teaching in Merton's long, dreamlike Marian hymn from the early 1960s. Kristin Johnston Largen (Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg) concluded the session with an analysis of the role of Buddhism-inspired insights in Merton's approach to soteriological questions, especially as seen in his changing attitudes toward traditional Christian doctrines of hell, purgatory, eschatology, and the human person.Between sessions, members and friends of the society participated in the annual SBCS/AAR field trip to a local site significant for its relevance to interdisciplinary Buddhist-Christian studies. This year members visited the Chicago Cultural Center of Soka Gakkai International-USA (SGI-USA), the Buddhist association for peace, culture, and education based on the teachings of thirteenth-century Japanese monk and reformer Nichiren Daishonin. Located at 1455 South Wabash Avenue in downtown Chicago, the cultural center serves as the primary facility for SGI-USA activities in the Midwest. Mr. Guy McCloskey, senior vice president, publisher, and member of the board of directors for SGI-USA, organized the event. The evening's program included a tour of the center's award-winning architecture, an informal overview of the aims and initiatives of SGI-USA, and a delicious dinner served by members of the organization. [End Page 144]Peter A. HuffCentenary College of LouisianaCopyright © 2009 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Oldest and Most Respected Uniform in the World1Zelig R. Weinstein“And all the peoples of the earth shall see that the name of the LORD is called upon thee; and they shall be afraid of thee.”(Deuteronomy 28:10)Rabbi Eliezer the Great says that this verse alludes to the Tefillin Shel Rosh, the small leather box containing Biblical verses that are worn by Jewish men on their head. During (...) Talmudic times and for centuries after, devout Jewish men would wear Tefillin the entire day. This practice is now only rarely seen. Since the 1960s, there has been a resurgence of public display of one’s adherence to traditional Jewish practices. It is increasingly common to see Jewish men wearing a yarmulke at work and in public spheres. There are perhaps thousands of Jewish doctors who don’t hesitate to wear their yarmulke in their places of practice–hospital, clinic, private practice.In the 1980s I joined the staff of the Department of Radiology at the Bethesda Naval Hospital as the Director of Neuroradiology and Interventional Radiology. As the hospital’s Neuroradiologist I presented the radiological findings for the cases presented at the bimonthly “brain cutting” sessions. These sessions were well attended by staff, residents and medical students from the Departments of Neurosurgery, Neurology, Neuropathology and Radiology. I was the only traditional Orthodox Jew at the hospital, clearly recognizable as such by the yarmulke I always wore (very unusual in the early 1980s). My yarmulke would provoke occasional good–natured kidding particularly from the neurosurgery staff and residents. [End Page 212]During one of these sessions, kidding about my yarmulke from a small group of residents was reaching a crescendo. The kidding came to a sudden halt when the Chief Resident of Neuro-surgery, a born and bred Louisianan, demanded everyone’s attention. When it quieted down he very sternly ordered everyone to carefully look at their uniforms. Everyone seemed perplexed but all followed suit. Almost a half–minute passed before the Chief Resident, with his thick Southern drawl, spoke. “Our [naval] uniforms are, at most, a couple of hundred years old.” He then pointed toward my yarmulke and said: “Dr. Weinstein’s uniform is thousands of years old and a lot more respected than our uniforms.”This was my initiation into the alluring, usually positive and unexpected fascination and respect that my obvious religiosity had on my patients, their families and my many colleagues during the almost seven years I spent at Bethesda.The story I will tell is very poignant. It involved the family of one of the most senior Chief Petty Officers of the United States Navy.Late one Sunday evening, I received a call from the Chief Resident, Dr. Steve Henning, informing me that the family matriarch had been admitted to Bethesda with relatively acute onset of significant neurological findings. The emergent workup confirmed the presence of a large mass, a meningioma, of the frontal lobe region with significant surrounding edema and mass effect. Neurosurgery requested embolization of the feeding vessels prior to surgery. The interventional procedure and possible serious complications were fully explained to the patient, her husband and her two daughters. Consent was signed and early Monday morning the patient was brought to Special Procedures to have the tumor embolized.Prior to the procedure I introduced myself to the patient’s family and spoke to them about the procedure. The patient’s husband and two daughters, one of whom was an active duty Navy nurse the other a minister of a fundamentalist church in the South, were very attentive and expressed concern about the procedure and its outcome. I tried to reassure them and told them I would speak to them during and after the procedure.All went well. Medically, the patient did well during and after the procedure. She was discharged from our care to neurosurgery. The patient and her family thanked us.After the patient left the Special Procedures area the Chief Technologist, Al, approached me and very cryptically asked if I was aware of what happened when the Chief Resident, Dr. Henning, spoke with the patient and family the night before. I was puzzled and replied, no. He... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Patient Self-Determination ActElizabeth Leibold McCloskey (bio)What are the ethics of extending the length of life? We know that we cannot artificially end life (Thou Shalt not Kill), but how about artificially extending life? Is that always good, sometimes good?... In ethics, is keeping people alive the highest good? Should our priority be to keep people breathing?... What does basic religious ethics say about this?(John C. Danforth, letter to (...) the author, 19 August 1989)The Patient Self-Determination Act, signed into law as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA '90) last November, marks the first time that Congress has passed legislation concerning the ethics of life-sustaining medical treatment. The bill was spearheaded by Senator John C. Danforth (RMO), who has a special interest in this area. An Episcopal priest, Danforth was formerly an assistant chaplain at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and now sits as a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. Although Senator Danforth's legislative initiative was not a result of the Cruzan case, it was in his state of Missouri that the U.S. Supreme Court case involving removal of Nancy Cruzan's feeding tube arose (Cruzan v. Director of Missouri Department of Health, U.S. Supreme Court, 58 LW 4916, 26 June 1990). From his unique vantage point, he felt it was time to craft a legislative response to some of the difficult issues surrounding prolongation of life.The short answer to Senator Danforth's questions about when to artificially extend life is simple enough: people must be free to determine that for themselves. Common law and common sense dictate such a conclusion; living will and health care proxy statutes, enacted in almost every state, codify that right. The Catholic moral tradition teaches that one is not morally obligated to use extraordinary means to prolong life, a tradition shared both by the mainline Protestant and the reform and conservative Jewish community. Yet most people are unaware of their fundamental legal right to make such decisions, and as court cases from Quinlan (In re Quinlin, 137 N.J. Super. 227, 1975) to Cruzan demonstrate, few know [End Page 163] how to make arrangements for this right to be exercised if they become incapacitated.Meanwhile, health care practices are often driven by a denial of death. When Senator Danforth and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) introduced the bill on October 17, 1989, Senator Danforth said:More and more it is arguable that we play God by subjecting people to unwanted and sometimes unnecessary treatment, treatment that unnaturally prolongs the dying process. Our health care system has become obsessed with extending life, at times neglecting the caring component of medicine and trampling on the rights of patients.(Congressional Record 1989, 135:5.13566)The American Hospital Association estimates that 70 percent of deaths now occur after a determination to withhold or withdraw medical treatment. Many of those decisions are made without the benefit of an incapacitated patient's views, yet a Harvard study revealed that 95 percent of the population would like to prepare in advance for such decisions. Only 4 percent of hospitals have a systematic method of asking patients if they have an advance directive. Family members confront painful choices in the face of uncertainty about their loved one's wishes and it can be even more painful when a family knows the patient's desires but providers and the courts act otherwise because clear evidence is lacking.The Patient Self-Determination Act is rooted in the belief that people should be given information that enables them to specify the extent of medical treatment they wish to receive should they become incapacitated. The public should be educated about applicable state laws that protect the individual's right to make such choices through the use of an advance directive.The Act moves toward that goal by promoting knowledge of state laws. It requires every hospital, nursing home, home health agency, hospice, and health maintenance organization that participates in Medicaid or Medicare to routinely give all adult patients information about advance directives. Patients will also be given information on the... (shrink)

With a growing number of genetic tests becoming available to the health and consumer markets, genetic health care providers in Canada are faced with the challenge of developing robust decision rules or guidelines to allocate a finite number of public resources. The objective of this study was to gain Canadian genetic health providers' perspectives on factors and criteria that influence and shape resource allocation decisions for publically funded predictive genetic testing in Canada. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 (...) class='Hi'>senior lab directors and clinicians at publically funded Canadian predictive genetic testing facilities. Participants were drawn from British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. Given the community sampled was identified as being relatively small and challenging to access, purposive sampling coupled with snowball sampling methodologies were utilized. Surveyed lab directors and clinicians indicated that predictive genetic tests were funded provincially by one of two predominant funding models, but they themselves played a significant role in how these funds were allocated for specific tests and services. They also rated and identified several factors that influenced allocation decisions and patients' decisions regarding testing. Lastly, participants provided recommendations regarding changes to existing allocation models and showed support for a national evaluation process for predictive testing. Our findings suggest that largely local and relatively ad hoc decision making processes are being made in relation to resource allocations for predictive genetic tests and that a more coordinated and, potentially, national approach to allocation decisions in this context may be appropriate. (shrink)

Writing a college-application essay has become a rite of passage for high-school seniors in the U.S., one whose importance has expanded over time due to an increasingly competitive admissions process. Various commentators have noted the disturbing evolution of these essays over the years, with an ever-greater emphasis placed on obstacles overcome and traumas survived. How have we gotten to the point where college-application essays are all too frequently competitive-victimhood displays? Colleges have an understandable interest in the disadvantages their applicants (...) may have suffered, but this interest—and the awareness of it among both applicants and their advisors—has led to a “race to the bottom”: in order to thrive (or even survive) in a particular competitive context, participants are forced to continuously lower relevant standards in a game of one-upmanship. With college essays, the competition is among high-school seniors for admission, the one-upmanship is an ever-escalating effort to persuade admission committees of one’s greater disadvantage, and the relevant standards being lowered are honesty, privacy, and dignity—or so I shall argue. As we shall see, this particular race to the bottom imposes unequal costs on certain groups and has implications stretching well beyond collegiate admissions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Revisiting the Launching of the Kennedy Institute: Re-visioning the Origins of BioethicsWarren Thomas Reich (bio)Twenty-five years ago, on October 1, 1971, at a press conference held at Georgetown University, the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics, later called the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, was officially inaugurated. To revisit that event—and the Institute’s five founding collaborators who spoke at it—provides an opportunity to (...) re-vision some of the most significant intellectual, moral, cultural, and political factors that shaped both this Institute and the then-nascent field of bioethics.Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who spoke at the press conference, was intensely committed to a new sort of philanthropy that would effect socio-political change in favor the dignity and well-being of the mentally disadvantaged. As executive vice-president of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, she had already applied the Foundation’s vision and resources to the task of harnessing the best of the “biological revolution” of the 1960s to prevent developmental disorders. Prompted by the values at stake in the care of the disadvantaged, she turned the Foundation toward the creation of the Institute in 1971.Just prior to the opening of the Institute, Mrs. Shriver had produced and appeared as introducer in a highly influential film, “Who Shall Survive?”, which dealt with a “mongoloid baby” who was allowed to die in the newborn clinic because of its condition. Showcased at a highly publicized symposium involving 2000 people (Editorial 1971) and widely discussed in the press, the film helped to establish neonatal ethics as paradigmatic for the emerging field of bioethics (Bedeviling Question 1971; Rothman 1991, pp. 190–221). Undoubtedly under the influence of her involvement in the publicizing of those issues, Mrs. Shriver commented at the press conference that she hoped the Institute would re-emphasize the value of children in face of the widespread feeling that children are a burden (Kennedys 1971, p. 19).At the press conference, then president of Georgetown University, Robert J. Henle, S.J., announced the Kennedy Foundation’s grant of $1.35 million to establish the Institute. Henle was undoubtedly alert to the fact that certain issues, such as abortion and terminating the lives of infants, would be perceived [End Page 323] as highly controversial when raised at a Catholic university. Not surprisingly, reporters at the press conference raised provocative questions about how Georgetown University would reconcile Catholic moral doctrine with the Institute’s broadly-based inquiries. Henle replied tersely that the Institute “will be a ‘truly ecumenical and catholic effort,’ defining catholic in its classical meaning of universal” (Helping 1971). The reporters might have found it quite ironic that within a few years Georgetown’s ecumenical vision had provided the intellectual environment that permitted the Institute to become famous for development of the first systematic, secular (principle-based) approach to bioethics (Reich 1995).Father Henle was probably also aware that by launching the Kennedy Institute he was creating the first institute principally devoted to ethics research ever established at a university. It took a special sort of university to take this first step into bioethics research and policymaking. In 1971, ethics was regarded as belonging to religion, and religion was generally regarded as suspect academically. While it was difficult, in that atmosphere, for a nonreligious university to take such a bold step, Henle’s Georgetown University offered a promising setting that could scarcely have been found in any other university. It departed from the common mold of Catholic-college-as-indoctrination-center, yet it had an explicit and unashamed commitment to the investigation of religious and secular values in an environment of academic freedom. It was an increasingly cosmopolitan university, committed to developing the best of secular scholarship. Furthermore, Henle was willing to experiment with as-yet unproven interdisciplinary studies.Sargent Shriver—god-father of the Kennedy Institute, chairman of its first Advisory Board, and a constant dialogue partner of his friend and the Institute’s founding director, Dr. André Hellegers—was intensely interested in linking scientific progress with religious belief, unfettered moral debate, and commitment to disadvantaged humans.At the inaugural event, the new Institute was described as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:St. John Henry Newman's Theory of Doctrinal Development and the Synodal Process:A Survey and Concrete ApplicationWilliam B. GoldinGood afternoon, Your Excellencies, Most Reverend bishops, and my brother priests. Firstly, please permit me to say that, while it is certainly an honor to have been invited to speak to you, for which I would like to express my gratitude to my own bishop and our host for this reunion, His (...) Excellency, Bishop Kevin W. Vann, it is also not a little bit daunting. To speak to such an erudite group of clerics, all of whom have a connection to our common alma mater and to the various celebrated universities in the Eternal City, brings back fond memories of my three years at the Casa Santa Maria. During that time, while I would occasionally have the opportunity to preach at Sunday Masses at the Casa, I was always keenly aware that I was not nearly as qualified to do so as many of my listeners. As such, I beg your pardon if I should fail to explain adequately any aspect of this lecture, and I would be grateful for any questions and/or corrections, theological or otherwise, that you may have afterwards.Let us begin with a prayer:In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. [End Page 21]Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of thy love. Send forth thy Spirit and they shall be created, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.Let us pray.O God, who didst inspire thy faithful by the light of thy Holy Spirit, grant that, in the same Spirit we may be truly wise and ever more rejoice in His holy consolation.Through Christ our Lord.Amen.Vergine Immacolata... Aiutateci.Introduction: The Synod on Synodality and Speculation on Doctrinal ChangeIn the late autumn of 2021, Bishop Vann appointed me and my colleague, Mrs. Katie Dawson, our diocesan director of parish faith formation, as the coordinators for the Synod on Synodality in the Diocese of Orange. In this role, we were tasked with bringing to fruition the diocesan phase of the synodal consultation of the faithful here in Orange County. Since last autumn, we have labored to carry out the bishop's synodal plan for this diocese, and I must say that I have been pleasantly surprised with the manner in which the consultation took place, and in its results, notwithstanding my initial reservations both as to the scope of this particular synod and as to the potential risks inherent in such a universal survey. As we all know from diocesan and parochial life, "listening sessions" have a tendency to become "shouting sessions"; and as a thoroughgoing introvert myself, such sessions do not exactly bring joy to my heart. Thankfully, though, my fears were not realized, and the actual experience of our synodal process was almost altogether pleasant.Perhaps surprisingly, one of the fruits of our consultation, which we heard from the majority of the faithful, is their clear desire for doctrinal clarity in their faith journeys. The majority of the People of God in Orange County whom we surveyed do not want to see any doctrinal changes emerge from this synod that could be critiqued for being in serious discontinuity with the [End Page 22] solemnly defined magisterial teaching of the past. Regularly, they expressed to us that, if our "journeying together" is to be authentic and credible, then the continuity of our doctrinal teaching is a matter of no small importance. Indeed, the ability of many to take the Church's faith seriously depends on whether the doctrinal content of that faith seems solid and unshakeable. If the content of our faith can shift substantially in ways that mirror modern shifts in secular thinking, then people can easily critique our faith as being blown about by the winds of change, with no certitude whatsoever. If something taught by the Catholic Church can be true today and false tomorrow, then why is the Catholic Church's message worth listening to at all? What we heard from the overwhelming majority of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cloning without Prior Approval:A Response to Recent Disclosures of NoncomplianceRuth Macklin (bio)Editor's note: In September 1994, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal published a special issue on the ethics of embryo splitting or "cloning," which included papers originally prepared for a workshop on embryo splitting sponsored by the National Advisory Board on Ethics in Reproduction (NABER) and NABER's report, Human Cloning through Embryo Splitting. The impetus for the project (...) was embryo-splitting research conducted by Drs. Jerry L. Hall, Robert J. Stillman, and others, at George Washington University and presented in October 1993 at a joint meeting of the American Fertility Society and the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society. Media coverage at the time reported that the research had been approved by the university's formal review committees. However, it came to light in December 1994 that the researchers had not obtained approval from the university's institutional review board prior to conducting the research. Following a university investigation, the researchers were disciplined and instructed to destroy their data. The university also voluntarily forwarded the records of the incident to the Office for Protection from Research Risks at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Hall resigned from George Washington University in September 1994.In the following postscript to her article on the ethics of embryo splitting (KIEJ, September 1994), Ruth Macklin discusses these events. The letters and memoranda that she cites were obtained from NIH through the Freedom of Information Act.My article, "Splitting Embryos on the Slippery Slope: Ethics and Public Policy" (KIEJ, September 1994), included a brief assessment of the ethics of the Hall-Stillman embryo-splitting experiment conducted at George Washington University (GWU). The article reviewed the researchers' stated purpose ("to help infertile couples by reproducing nature's ability to reproduce twins"), the features of the research itself (splitting embryos that never could become viable and with no plan to implant either the original or the split embryos), and the review procedures surrounding the experiment. I said that the researchers might be [End Page 57] faulted for not waiting until embryo research guidelines had been established at the national level; on the other hand, they surely could not fail to conform to such national guidelines when none existed.My conclusions were based on information that had been reported in the print media. Dr. Robert J. Stillman's statement that the experiment "had been approved by the university's formal review committees and peer reviewed by colleagues" was reported in the Washington Post on October 25, 1993, (Sawyer 1993). However, in light of the recent disclosure that the researchers had not obtained approval from George Washington University's IRB before proceeding with the research (Schwartz 1994), I now draw a sharply different conclusion about the ethics of the researchers' behavior.The most glaring flaw was the researchers' failure to submit a protocol to their institution's IRB in advance of embarking on the research. Following an investigation of the matter, the Office for Protection from Research Risks (OPRR) made the further determination that "the failure on the part of GWU research investigators and administrators to notify the IRB promptly about noncompliance in this research constitutes additional serious noncompliance" with research regulations (J. Thomas Puglisi, Chief of the Compliance Oversight Branch, Division of Human Subject Protections, OPRR, letter to Stephen J. Trachtenberg, President of George Washington University, 23 August 1994). Is it reasonable to suppose that these researchers were unaware of their obligations (a) to obtain prior review and approval from the IRB and (b) to notify the IRB promptly about their noncompliance? Regarding the latter item, Dr. Puglisi's letter to the President of GWU states that "the notification requirement has been a longstanding element of the GWU MPA [multiple project assurance], which should have been familiar to all members of the GWU research community." I shall concentrate on the researchers' more glaring ethical omission, failure to obtain prior review and approval from the IRB.Did either or both of these researchers contend that they were unaware of any review requirements for their research? Hall blames Stillman, Director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology, Fertility, and IVF Programs, for not making the requirement... (shrink)

Rights, justice, and power raise many interesting questions. Why do such basic concepts as rights and justice have such differentpoints of concern—equality, proportionality, medium rei (moderation or the middle of the thing itself without reference to the person using it)? Why are there such different perspectives in philosophy, theology, and law? Why is the notion of power in business ethics so isolated from the general discussion of applied justice in treatises on business contracts, employee relations, and in other related topics? (...) Discussions of power seemed parallel with discussions of justice. The two did not seem to intersect.In this paper I shall argue that rights, power, and justice are interrelated. While natural rights are the basis for justice, rights cannotbe realized nor justice become operative without power. I shall call this relationship and the theory underlying it “Transforming Justice.”One of the basic concerns of this article is to notice the lack of interaction between rights and power in the traditional theories ofjustice. Granted that for many philosophers it is sufficient to determine what is just. But the notion of justice as an active virtue that persons are to exercise in their dealings with others goes further. It touches the realities of life that every person experiences. Life doesnot separate rights from power. Reflection upon the current separation of rights from power both in theory and in action is analogous to the separation of the “sensory” from the “imaginative” in art and in life. The urge to devise a framework of justice that brings out thewholeness of its existential being is the underlying rationale for developing a theory of transforming justice. Another purpose fordeveloping a theory of transforming justice is to suggest a conceptual framework of business ethics and corporate social responsibility that incorporates values, rights, power, and virtue. Authors and teachers approach these issues either from a value (or rights/justice)perspective or from the view that institutions respond only to those who exercise power (apart from legitimate claims). Thus, it isnecessary for a conceptual framework to incorporate the dynamics of power and the qualifying aspects of rights or claims.A natural law approach to justice and rights argues that humans have certain basic rights that others, whether humans or institutions(regardless of source), are required to respect. Natural rights theory places the burden or duty on each individual to respect the rights ofevery other person. In addition, justice is usually defined by natural law theorists as “giving each person his or her due,” what is requiredby natural rights, what is owed, earned, or deserved. But its applications fall short of reality. It raises other questions. How does one person get another to give him what is “his due”? How are duties and claims entailed by natural rights enforced in practice? The notionof transforming justice attempts to answer these questions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 14-30 [Access article in PDF] Mallarmé Contra Wagner Eric Gans I In early 1885, Edouard Dujardin wrote to Stéphane Mallarmé for a contribution to his newly founded Revue wagnérienne. Mallarmé, admitting that he had never seen--and perhaps never heard--anything of Wagner, replied to Dujardin in July that he was working on a "half article, half prose poem," and that "never has anything seemed to (...) me more difficult." 1 A month later, the Revue published a text, more prose poem than article, entitled "Richard Wagner, rêverie d'un poète français." 2Wagner was an increasingly obligatory reference for the French avant-garde after his death in 1883. But as far back as 1862, the 20-year-old Mallarmé, no doubt influenced by Baudelaire's enthusiastic groundbreaking article "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris" of the year before, had included Wagner along with Mozart and Beethoven in a group of three creators of the "mystery" of music, in a brief article entitled "Artistic Heresies: Art for Everyone." Characteristically enough, what fascinated the young Mallarmé was not music itself so much as the "signes sévères, chastes, inconnus" ("severe, chaste, unknown signs") (OC, p. 257) with which it was written, which give music the advantage over poetry--written in the universally understood alphabet--of being inaccessible to the uninitiated. This characteristic emphasis on writing over sound reappears in the "Hommage" sonnet for Wagner published in Dujardin's journal in January 1886, where Wagner's music is described as "mal tu par l'encre même en sanglots sibyllins" ("badly silenced by the ink itself in Sibylline sobs") (OC, p. 71). As we shall see, however, the relation between music and poetry suggested in "Art for Everyone" had by then been reversed. [End Page 14]Unlike most of his circle, Mallarmé was no Wagnerite; his "Rêverie," like his sonnet, expresses reluctant praise and reflects a certain professional jealousy. The theater had long been Mallarmé's chief preoccupation, as it had been for so many nineteenth-century writers who would be forced to make their reputation in other genres. The unfinished poem "Hérodiade," which occupied him throughout his life, took the form of a drama, and an early version of the "Après-midi d'un faune" had actually been presented to a theater director. References to music in Mallarmé's writings increase in number and specificity after 1885, and it is not unreasonable to assume that for him the prime representative of "music" in this period was Wagner. However much Mallarmé's own theater had become internalized and idealized, Wagner's theatrical success, as well as his near-deification by friends and disciples like Dujardin or Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, could not leave the poet indifferent. II What I would like to explore, however, is something more fundamental than the personal equation. Mallarmé's rivalry with Wagner over the theatrical center of culture is the rivalry of two arts and their respective means. What makes Mallarmé's critique of Wagner of particular interest is the exemplary rigor of the former's artistic intentions. Mallarmé's poems are a series of attempts to produce literary form with a minimum of figural content. Each poem has been submitted, so to speak, to Ockham's razor. The ultimate aim of this labor may be described as the discovery of the originary scene of poetry itself, the minimal sine qua non of representation, and therefore of humanity. 3 On the contrary, Wagner did not shrink from saturating the figural imagination in the pursuit of his totalizing aims. The confrontation reveals that musical maximalism in the service of national myth becomes a threat to what we may call, from Mallarmé's minimalist perspective, the anthropological mission of true art.Mallarmé held no particular brief for the theater of words; his tastes in performance went rather to the ballet, or to the mime-show, the subject of one of his most aesthetically interesting reflections. 4 Mallarmé anticipated 20th-century dramaturgy in seeing the theater not as a place for ratiocination and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Caroline, Leibniz, and ClarkeD. Bertoloni Meli*The papers which passed between Leibniz and Clarke from 1715 to 1716 have long been considered classics in the history of science and philosophy, attracting a large number of scholarly works. Their exchanges, consisting of ten letters, five by Leibniz and five by Clarke, ended with Leibniz’s death in November 1716. 1 The letters deal with issues such as God’s role in the universe, (...) the notion of miracles, the cause of gravity, and space and time. The difficulties in interpreting the texts induced most, if not all, editors to present Leibniz’s and Clarke’s papers together with other writings to provide a context for the dispute and to elucidate the most obscure passages. This tradition was inaugurated by Samuel Clarke himself, who included in his editio princeps a number of explanatory footnotes, an appendix with passages from Leibniz’s printed works, and additional epistolary exchanges between himself and others on liberty and necessity, all with appropriate cross-references. 2 Later editors made a different selection of explanatory material, emphasizing different contexts and aspects of the dispute.The context I have selected for this essay centers on Caroline of Ansbach, Princess of Wales, her life and contacts with Leibniz prior to her departure for London, and their correspondence before and during the dispute with Clarke. [End Page 469] Portions of this correspondence can be found in the editions by H.G. Alexander and André Robinet, but the letters on which I shall spend more time are curiously excluded. They can be found among Leibniz’s political and state papers edited at the end of last century by Onno Klopp, and only in part in those edited by John M. Kemble, and in the recent German edition by Volmar Schüller. 3 The reader unaware of Caroline’s life and intellectual horizon may well wonder why Leibniz and Clarke went on relentlessly, month after month, debating in letters addressed to her whether space is the sensorium of God, dissecting the notion of miracle, and arguing about God’s role in the world. I hope to show that there are several reasons for paying attention to Caroline. The text which has become known as “Leibniz’s first paper” was in fact an extract of a letter to Caroline, not intended for Clarke, belonging to an important exchange with the Princess of Wales. Caroline engaged in a dispute with Clarke, passed the extract of Leibniz’s letter to him, and sent Clarke’s reply to Leibniz together with a request for help. Thus Leibniz’s “first paper” ought to be seen as part of his correspondence with Caroline. Later papers between Leibniz and Clarke went through Caroline.The Princess of Wales was not just a convenient address for the correspondence; nor was she a spectator uninterested in such an intellectual confrontation. She was involved in the dispute by arguing with Clarke and even with Newton, exchanging opinions with Leibniz, and functioning as an arbiter and moderator. Her presence helped shape the style and contents of the letters, and characterizes the genre to which the correspondence belongs. This is a complex issue because of the composite nature of the exchanges: on the one hand we have Leibniz’s letters to both Caroline and Clarke, on the other we have Caroline’s and Clarke’s letters to Leibniz, and Clarke’s discussions with Caroline. Clearly the standard label “Leibniz-Clarke correspondence” does not capture all levels of the exchanges. Moreover, in order to appreciate Caroline’s status in London it is worth recalling that the wife of George I, Sophie Dorothea, remained in Germany, secluded in the Castle of Ahlden. 4 Without a Queen, the Princess of Wales was the highest female royal. As an example of her influence, it was widely believed at the time that the election of William Wake as Archbishop of Canterbury in December 1715 was due to his close contacts with Caroline. At the time of the dispute Wake, who was a close friend of Clarke, neglected his pastoral duties as Bishop of Lincoln in order to be close to Caroline, with whom he held daily meetings. Thus Caroline was an... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Awful Patriotism: Richard Rorty and the Politics of KnowingDavid Palumbo-Liu* (bio)Richard Rorty. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.This essay addresses the current debates surrounding what some have labeled the Two Lefts: a “cultural left” and an activist left. 1 Debate over this “divide” has made many strange bedfellows, but perhaps none quite so unheimlich as “liberal leftist” Richard Rorty and cultural conservative Harold (...) Bloom. To be sure, Rorty has often alluded to Bloom’s work, especially Bloom’s notion of “strong poets,” but in his most recent book, Rorty has appropriated Bloom in a particularly telling manner. In 1994, Harold Bloom published his polemic The Western Canon. At once eloquent and pathetic, it pressed all the right buttons. Bloom succinctly (or shall we say, reductively?) deployed his version of the “aesthetic” against any other approach. Cultural conservatives were gratified that someone of Bloom’s stature had done them the service of voicing their interests in a highly visible and contestatory manner; more moderate sorts squirmed uncomfortably at Bloom’s unabashed elitism and the shrillness of his tone; theorists and cultural studies folks were outraged at Bloom’s absolute ignorance of their work and his resort to parody instead of anything vaguely resembling an engaged critique; and ethnic, minority, queer, and feminist critics had more than enough to be insulted by in his racist and sexist arrogance. So far out is Bloom’s jeremiad that it probably came close to realizing his worst nightmare—it may have driven students screaming into all those horrid cultural studies classes to find out what was so seductive, so powerful as to corner The Canon. So I didn’t worry too much about The Western Canon. That is, until I read Richard Rorty’s essay “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature” and its companion pieces in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. What was Rorty, a self-proclaimed leftist, doing, calling to his aid the social and cultural archconservative Harold Bloom?In the first part of my essay I ponder this strange alliance, particularly as it joins forces against ethnic studies (to be sure, its common target is more generally “theory” of any stripe or color, but I want specifically to address the issue of ethnic literary study). Rorty adapts Bloom’s School of Resentment to characterize what he calls a certain, bad “knowingness,” against which he poses “hope” and “inspiration.” I want to examine more closely the nature and content of that destructive “knowledge,” for it becomes clear that [End Page 37] this knowledge is for Rorty the recognition of Otherness as a politically (as opposed to “merely” ontologically) functional identity. This knowledge is disturbing to Rorty and deeply informs his notions of “patriotism” and Americanism. For him, such knowledge impedes the formation of a leftist politics. It is precisely the disjunction between the “knowing” discourse of the cultural left obsessed with identity politics and an activist political left (modeled after the old reformist left) that troubles Rorty.My essay will be largely devoted to showing how Rorty’s recent work develops his earlier work on “ethnocentrism” into an “Americanism” that erodes precisely the liberal foundations of that earlier work and discloses the weakness of its claims. I understand this development as compelled by a certain impatience with identity politics that is shared by a number of liberal and leftist critics of American political society, an impatience fueled perhaps not so much by a conservative threat as by a perceived threat from “within” progressive politics. Basically, I ask, how and why are knowledge and recognition of “difference” taken to immobilize progressive politics? To frame that same question in a slightly different manner—what is the presumed content of that “progressive” politics, and what assumptions do we have to make in order to arrive at that point of view?Against the rather odd Bloom/Rorty pairing, set against “knowledge,” one would naturally seek out an enemies list for possible allies. Rorty in fact begins his essay by providing us with one in the figure of Fredric Jameson, an archpractitioner of theory whose “antiromantic” skepticism Rorty finds both debilitating and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life by Fabrizio AmeriniJohn LanganReview: Fabrizio Amerini, Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life, trans. Mark Henninger, Harvard University Press, 2013The ongoing and apparently interminable debate over the moral and legal status of abortion has come over the years to resemble the Western front in World War I, with two contending armies facing each other with limited maneuvering (...) room, familiar and overused weapons, periodic artillery barrages, increasing casualties, not much new to report, and a deadly ‘no man’s land’ between them in which virtually nothing survives. Against the gloomy monotony of the abortion wars, in which reductivist accounts of the opponents’ views and repetitious restatements of familiar and cherished views predominate, this book by Fabrizio Amerini, a professor of philosophy at the University of Parma, appears as a refreshing surprise. It is surprising for a number of reasons, which I shall present later. But its refreshing character comes primarily from its moderate tone and the care with which its arguments are presented. Amerini is clearly familiar with the Catholic tradition on abortion and euthanasia; he is respectful of this tradition, which he does not directly challenge, but his sense of scholarly integrity prevents him from simply presenting Aquinas as a defender and synthesizer of all the positions championed in that tradition or by its papal custodians. He has an impressive command of the relevant texts in Aquinas and the Fathers of the Church, which he joins with a scrupulous style of [End Page E-103] philosophical argument which has an affinity with the clarifying labors of G. E. Moore in the early days of analytic moral philosophy. The result is not easy reading, but the reader can be confident that the desire to score rhetorical points and political victories will not distort the philosophical and historical analysis. The book is intended primarily for those who can benefit from careful scholarship, but it should be instructive for all who regard the questions of abortion and euthanasia as genuinely difficult and as deserving our best intellectual efforts.The most important surprise is Amerini’s focus on the issue of delayed versus immediate hominization in the development from embryo to complete human being. Since Pius IX in 1867, the Vatican has insisted that from the moment of conception the embryo becomes a human person whose life is sacred and deserves full protection. This view is ordinarily discussed as ‘immediate hominization’. In Amerini’s view, the embryo lacks the development and differentiation of organs which would enable it to have a sustainable potentiality to perform the acts which are proper to a human person, particularly reasoning and choosing. In the Vatican’s view, the soul is immediately infused by God, though it obviously requires many years of development before it is able to function as a complete and distinct human person. Amerini regards this position as untenable within Aquinas’s metaphysical system and finds in Aquinas’s own texts evidence that he teaches a discontinuous process in fetal life. Amerini regards the insistence on immediate hominization as an arbitrary effort to maintain an absolute uniformity of moral status in all the stages of embryonic and fetal life. He sees the Vatican’s position as leading to an equation of abortion and homicide which he regards as unjustified. He does, however, affirm that there is an identity of subject running from the embryo to the developed person and also that this grounds an ethic of respect for life in all of its stages. The practical conclusions in bioethics he would draw from this position “could allow space for a judicious and discriminating ethical evaluation of individual cases,” as he puts the matter in the concluding sentence of the book.Other surprises are the author’s discovering from a careful reading of Aquinas’s texts that he taught a progressive plurality of substantial forms in the development of the embryo. For Aquinas, it is the substantial form which answers the question about what sort of being the object of our inquiry is. In the case of human persons, the substantial form is the soul, which includes the intellectual properties of... (shrink)

This study examines how visibility of a content moderator and ambiguity of moderated content influence perception of the moderation system in a social media environment. In the course of a two-day pre-registered experiment conducted in a realistic social media simulation, participants encountered moderated comments that were either unequivocally harsh or ambiguously worded, and the source of moderation was either unidentified, or attributed to other users or an automated system (AI). The results show that when comments were moderated by an (...) AI versus other users, users perceived less accountability in the moderation system and had less trust in the moderation decision, especially for ambiguously worded harassments, as opposed to clear harassment cases. However, no differences emerged in the perceived moderation fairness, objectivity, and participants confidence in their understanding of the moderation process. Overall, our study demonstrates that users tend to question the moderation decision and system more when an AI moderator is visible, which highlights the complexity of effectively managing the visibility of automatic content moderation in the social media environment. (shrink)

Theoretical arguments regarding the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on firm liability risk are abundant; however, empirical evidence about this relationship is scarce. We investigate the relationship between CSR and the personal liability risk of a firm’s directors and officers. We argue that companies with better CSR performance represent a better underwriting risk for directors’ and officers’ (D&O) insurance providers and, therefore, have a lower cost of insurance. Our results show that firms with better CSR performance are more likely (...) to purchase D&O insurance and have a lower premium-to-coverage ratio, known as the insurance rate-on-line. We also show that this risk-reduction effect is stronger for firms that operate in a high-risk environment and have higher sales growth. These results provide evidence that CSR can be used as a risk management tool to mitigate liability risk and suggest which firms benefit most from this effect. (shrink)

As the COVID-19 crisis unfolded, older people in the Netherlands were framed as essentially vulnerable. In the public discourse, the figure of the “vulnerable senior” rose to unprecedented prominence. Taking a critical-phenomenological approach, we combine an empirical study with philosophical reflection, drawing on phenomenological and post-structuralist work on vulnerability and precarity to interpret quotes from daily newspapers and other media. This approach leads us to distinguish three forms of vulnerability: (1) vulnerability as discursive effect; (2) vulnerability as unrealizable; and (...) (3) vulnerability as creative appropriation. We conclude that the COVID-19 crisis has reinforced the entanglement of age and vulnerability and has led to novel social distinctions and labels. These labels harbor harmful stereotypes and are in constant need of critical evaluation. Still, the people who are affected by them are not passively dominated; rather, they exhibit a certain freedom in re-interpreting and challenging their situation. It is this attention to the entanglement of discourse and lived experience that situates our research in the broader field of critical phenomenology. (shrink)

Drawing from the group engagement model and the moral conviction literature, we propose that perceived leader ethical conviction moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee OCB as well as deviance. In a field study of employees from various industries and a scenario-based experiment, we revealed that both the positive relation between ethical leadership and employee OCB and the negative relation between ethical leadership and employee deviance are more pronounced when leaders are perceived to have weak rather than strong ethical (...) convictions. Further, we argued and showed that employees’ feelings of personal control and perceived voice opportunity mediated the interactive effect of ethical leadership and perceived leader ethical conviction on OCB and deviance. Implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:33 HOW TO BECOME A MODERATE SKEPTIC: HUME'S WAY OUT OF PYRRHONISM The nature and extent of Hume's skepticism have been assessed in various ways. He was viewed as a radical skeptic until the end of the XIXth century. Many contemporary interpretations, which can be traced back to Kemp Smith's book, have claimed since that a reassessment was indispensable if we are to take seriously either the very (...) project of a science of human nature or Hume's naturalist conception of belief. The idea of a science of human nature presupposes that at least some sort of positive knowledge is possible. The naturalist conception of belief claims that some of our beliefs, though lacking rational justification, are nevertheless unavoidable and gain this way a certainty all their own. Both the Treatise of Human Nature in Book I and the Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding -1 conclude with a moderate or mitigated skepticism after making a strong case for radical pyrrhonism. In this paper I wish to carry out two connected tasks: first I want to consider whether Hume's skepticism in the Treatise is the same as that of the Enquiry or not; second, I want to determine which arguments he puts forward for his shift from pyrrhonism to modern skepticism. The most noticeable differences between the Treatise and the Enquiry occur immediately after the analysis of causation. In the Enquiry we find almost nothing concerning the reality of the external world and the nature of the self, but Hume emphasizes heavily the 34 anti-metaphysical and anti-theological outcomes of the science of human nature in his sections on Liberty and Necessity (VIII), on Miracles (X), on Providence and a possible future state (XI). He stresses the devastating agnostic consequences of his principles and his agnosticism culminates in the dreadful censorship of the final lines of the book. On the contrary, the fourth part of the Treatise, Book I, offers an intricate and sophisticated treatment of various subjects. The intricacy shows in the very title of this part: "Of the Sceptical and Other Systems of Philosophy." Hume actually intertwines the exposition of his skeptical system — an expression which sounds odd — with the critical examination of rival systems and an attempt at accounting for the nature of things. These intricate undertakings are the direct upshot of Hume's analysis of causation. He thinks he has established that our causal beliefs are the products of custom alone and that nevertheless they are our only reliable beliefs. Lacking any rational justification, they are simply natural — which means that we cannot hinder ourselves from making inferences and predictions. Accordingly, reason has been immersed in the wider concept of imagination and thus naturalized: it is "nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls" (T 179). Basically, some beliefs are unavoidable. Now, a crucial problem is to know how far we can go into the analysis of such natural beliefs. In the Treatise, Hume sets out to investigate some of them whereas in the Enquiry he is more prudent and merely talks of instincts without considering their mechanism. In the Treatise, the tentative analysis of these natural beliefs has important metaphysical outcomes. Using the concepts and principles of his new-born science of human nature, Hume provides us with 35 a new ontology which states the nature of things from the standpoint of our beliefs concerning it. Thus, we get a Humean version of the nature of the external world and of the nature of the self. Unfortunately, this assessment of what there is on the basis of what we believe there is has unwanted skeptical effects. Hume's "as if" ontology tends to appear definitely fictitious, all the more so because the analysis of our natural beliefs is not successful and even quite defective. So, the skeptical outcome pushes through the positive project itself as the failure to account for our natural beliefs shakes the very belief in their special reliability. Such is, for example, the blatant result of the study of our belief in the external world (T 217). Again, in the Treatise, Hume is eager to emphasize the devastating anti-metaphysical implications of his thought. Under the... (shrink)

As government pressure on major technology companies builds, both firms and legislators are searching for technical solutions to difficult platform governance puzzles such as hate speech and misinformation. Automated hash-matching and predictive machine learning tools – what we define here as algorithmic moderation systems – are increasingly being deployed to conduct content moderation at scale by major platforms for user-generated content such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This article provides an accessible technical primer on how algorithmic moderation works; examines some (...) of the existing automated tools used by major platforms to handle copyright infringement, terrorism and toxic speech; and identifies key political and ethical issues for these systems as the reliance on them grows. Recent events suggest that algorithmic moderation has become necessary to manage growing public expectations for increased platform responsibility, safety and security on the global stage; however, as we demonstrate, these systems remain opaque, unaccountable and poorly understood. Despite the potential promise of algorithms or ‘AI’, we show that even ‘well optimized’ moderation systems could exacerbate, rather than relieve, many existing problems with content policy as enacted by platforms for three main reasons: automated moderation threatens to further increase opacity, making a famously non-transparent set of practices even more difficult to understand or audit, further complicate outstanding issues of fairness and justice in large-scale sociotechnical systems and re-obscure the fundamentally political nature of speech decisions being executed at scale. (shrink)

Based on the life history theory and broadening construction theory, the study aimed to investigate the influence of Machiavellianism on the learning-related subjective well-being and the underlying mechanism, 582 Chinese senior high school students including 289 girls and 310 boys were recruited to participate in this study, and they anonymously filled out questionnaires regarding Machiavellianism, learning-related subjective well-being, gratitude, and subjective family economic level. The results showed that: a higher level of Machiavellianism was associated with a lower level of (...) learning-related subjective well-being; gratitude partially mediated the relationship between Machiavellianism and learning-related subjective well-being; subjective family economic level moderated the links between Machiavellianism and learning-related subjective well-being, and between gratitude and learning-related subjective well-being. This study explained how and when Machiavellianism affected Chinese senior high school students’ learning-related subjective well-being and provided a deeper understanding of the relationship between Machiavellianism and learning-related subjective well-being. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis which has witnessed consumers experiencing significant anxiety provoked by the threats to their health and even lives. Meanwhile, consumers have been observed to make more ethical purchases since the start of the pandemic. Drawing on literature on terror management and negotiable fate, this research employs a moderated moderating model to investigate how consumers’ perception of the pandemic severity leads to ethical consumption as a defensive mechanism against death-related anxiety, as well as the differential (...) role of consumers’ belief in negotiable fate in moderating this pandemic impact across tight and loose cultures. We conducted two cross-cultural studies with 592 and 423 respondents, respectively, at different times during the pandemic. Results consistently show that perceived pandemic severity increases consumers’ intention to consume ethically. Consumers’ belief in negotiable fate directly enhances ethical consumption, but it alleviates the effect of pandemic severity on ethical consumption among consumers who live in a tight culture. Our findings reveal the existential meaning of ethical consumption as a buffer against pandemic-triggered mortality salience, identify the positive psychological functions of negotiable fate in promoting ethical consumption but mitigating consumers’ need to buffer death-related concerns, and advances the importance of investigating the cultural variances in the terror management process toward ethical consumption. The findings offer insights for marketers and policy makers to develop effective strategies to support consumers’ ethical coping during societal crises. (shrink)

RESUMEN La falta de equidad y justicia en la distribución de alta tecnología no excluye la salud pública en casos donde la disponibilidad es inferior a la demanda. Dentro de la estomatología, la implantología en Cuba dispone de recursos limitados y la valoración multidisciplinaria para rehabilitar mediante implantes dentales al adulto mayor depende de factores objetivos y subjetivos. En el presente artículo, en la medida que se identifican los factores que determinan en la exclusión de adultos mayores para rehabilitarse mediante (...) implantes dentales; se pretende como objetivo exponer consideraciones clínicas y éticas a considerar para una justa y eficaz selección. Se concluyó que los factores subjetivos influyen en los bajos índices de ingresos de adultos mayores para rehabilitarse, y que la consulta multidisciplinaria debe impartir equidad y justicia en la selección considerando la calidad de vida como un factor primordial para alcanzar un envejecimiento saludable. ABSTRACT The lack of justness and justice in the distribution of high technology don't exclude the public health in cases where the readiness is inferior to the demand. Inside of dentistry, the implantology has in our country limited resources, and the multidisciplinary assesment to rehabilitate by means of dental implant to senior adult it depends on objective and subjective factors. In this article, in the measure that the factors which determine an bigger exclusion of senior adult are identified to become rehabilitated by means of dental implant; it is sought as objective to expose clinical and ethical considerations to consider for a fair and effective selection. Was concluded that in spite of having an established systematical diagnoses, subjective factors influence in the low index of senior adult to become rehabilitated, and that the multidisciplinary consultation should impart justness and justice in the selection considering the quality of life like a primordial factor to reach a healthy aging. (shrink)

Critical thinking has been widely regarded as an indispensable cognitive skill in the 21st century. However, its associations with the affective aspects of psychological functioning are not well understood. This study explored the interrelations between trait mindfulness, critical thinking, cognitive distortions, and psychological distress using a moderated mediation model. The sample comprised 287 senior secondary school students (57% male and 43% female) aged 14–19 from a local secondary school in Hong Kong. The results revealed that high critical thinking was (...) significantly associated with high levels of psychological distress when mindful awareness was low among adolescents. Trait mindfulness was found to moderate the indirect effects of critical thinking on psychological distress via cognitive distortions as the mediator. Specifically, in low trait mindfulness conditions, critical thinking was found to associate positively with cognitive distortions and psychological distress. Such associations were not observed in high trait mindfulness conditions. The findings reveal that though critical thinking has positive associations with cognitive functioning, its associations with affective well-being might be negative. The results also suggest that mindfulness might play an important role in preventing the possible psychological distress associated with critical thinking. Educational implications relating to the fostering of critical thinking and mindful awareness are discussed. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has stressed Montesquieu's theory of moderate politics, suggesting that these contradictions exist only when we assume that Montesquieu was extolling the merits of a specific species of government (democracy, aristocratic republic, or monarchy) rather than a type of government (moderate). But unresolved is the point at which Montesquieu became enamoured with moderate regimes. Without entering directly into this debate, I am proposing that an examination of the �Tale of the Troglodytes� reveals that Montesquieu's interest in moderate government extends (...) at least back to the time of the writing of the Persian Letters. Further, I want to suggest that Montesquieu was, in this tale, developing an idea which would become of profound importance to his Spirit of the Laws, and that is the question of participatory politics. In a word, the sequel to the �Tale of the Troglodytes� suggests that the practice of commerce could, within the context of the moderate regime, teach citizens the skill of practical politics. (shrink)

Appointment as a director of a company board often represents the pinnacle of a management career. Worldwide, it has been noted that very few women are appointed to the boards of directors of companies. Blame for the low numbers of women of company boards can be partly attributed to the widely publicized "glass ceiling". However, the very low representation of women on company boards requires further examination. This article reviews the current state of women's representation on boards of directors (...) and summarizes the reasons as to why women are needed on company boards. Given that more women on boards are desirable, the article then describes how more women could be appointed to boards, and the actions that organizations and women could take to help increase the representation of women. Finally, the characteristics of those women that have succeeded in becoming members of company boards are described from an international perspective. Unfortunately, answers to the vexing question of whether these women have gained board directorships in their own right as extremely competent managers, or whether they are mere token female appointments in a traditional male dominated culture, remains elusive. (shrink)